Comment by userbinator
6 hours ago
I don't want Boot Guard or any of that DRM crap. I want freedom.
I want to make a persistent implant/malware that survives OS reinstalls.
Look up Absolute Computrace Persistence. It's there by default in a lot of BIOS images, but won't survive a BIOS reflash with an image that has the module stripped out (unless you have the "security" of Boot Guard, which will effectively make this malware mandatory!)
I’m more interested in demonstrating how important hardware root of trust is.
You mean more interested in toeing the line of corporate authoritarianism.
Well, this project is literally about me circumventing/removing Boot Guard so I don’t know how it’s corporate authoritarianism. I’m literally getting rid of it. In doing so I get complete control of the BIOS/firmware down to the reset vector. I can disable ME. To me, that’s ultimate freedom.
As a power user, do I want boot guard on my personal PC? Honestly, no. And we’re in luck because a huge amount of consumer motherboards have a Boot Guard profile so insecure it’s basically disabled. But do I want our laptops at work to have it, or the server I have at a colocation facility to have it? Yes I do. Because I don’t want my server to have a bootkit installed by someone with an SPI flasher. I don’t want my HR rep getting hidden, persistent malware because they ran an exe disguised as a pdf. It’s valuable in some contexts.
I want an equivalent of boot guard that I hold the keys to. Presented only with a binary choice certainly having boot guard is better than not having it if physical device security is in question. But that ought to be a false dichotomy. Regulation has failed us here.
Some days you’re the anarchist, some days you’re the corporate authority. :D
> You mean more interested in toeing the line of corporate authoritarianism.
That’s not what I got from their post. After all, they’re putting in some effort to hardware backdoor their motherboard, physically removing BootGuard. I read it as “if your hardware is rooted then your software is, no matter what you do.”